Chinese attitudes towards gay rights

By J.P. | BEIJING

WHEN Taiwan’s highest court ruled on May 24th that marriage should not be limited to a man and a woman and ordered parliament either to change the law or award marriage rights to gay couples within two years, the official media over the strait in China reacted with a barely stifled yawn. Just one state-owned, English-language newspaper took notice of a decision that would be the first to legalise gay marriage in an Asian country (not counting New Zealand). The more widely read Chinese version ignored it, as did television and other news outlets. Chinese history shows the country has long been relaxed about homosexuality. So why is China hostile, or at best indifferent, to gay rights now?

In poetry of the 9th century, usually held to be the golden age of Chinese literature, it is sometimes hard to tell whether a love poem is addressed to a woman or a man. In sharp contrast to Christianity and Islam, Chinese religious and social thinking does not harshly condemn same-sex relationships. Taoism regarded homosexual sex as neither good nor bad, while Confucianism, by encouraging close relations between master and pupils, is sometimes thought to have indirectly encouraged it. China’s greatest novel, “The Dream of the Red Chamber”, written in the late 18th century, includes both heterosexual and same-sex relations. Among literate elites, China does not seem to have shared the strong bias evident elsewhere. Moreover, homosexuality was legalised in China in 1997 (before that it could be prosecuted under a law banning hooliganism).